Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print setting technique.
Description of the Related Art
A printer driver has a user interface (UI) for accepting detailed print settings from a user. In a conventional print setting processing system, when printing by an application, the user invokes the UI of the printer driver via a button for making detailed settings by the user.
Recently, an increasing number of devices are equipped with a touch panel thanks to the development of tablets and mobile devices such as a mobile phone. UIs capable of operations not only suited to a conventional computer but also suited to a touch panel have also been developed for an operating system (OS). Note that a conventional UI screen will be called a desktop UI or desktop UI environment. A UI screen optimized for a touch panel will be called a touch panel UI or touch panel UI environment.
When creating a UI suited to a touch panel, the UI needs to be designed so that it can be handled more simply and clearly by a small number of operations by, for example, arranging each control (display content) to be displayed large, or decreasing the number of choices of a control. For example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2012-123778 (patent literature 1), frequently used setting items are provided to a user by arranging a model-independent common setting screen in addition to a model-dependent individual setting UI. On the common setting screen, the user can perform a setting operation with a constant sense of use and make settings by a small number of operations. This improves the user operability.
However, if only the touch panel UI with a small number of choices of a control is displayed as the UI, the user friendliness becomes poor for a user who wants to make more detailed settings. Therefore, this specification will examine a method of switching the UI by a user between the touch panel UI with a small number of choices of a control and the desktop UI with a large number of choices of a control. When this method is employed, it is more user-friendly to keep displaying, even on the touch panel UI, a choice selected once on the desktop UI.
In patent literature 1, model-dependent unique parameters and the like are not displayed among choices settable as the parameters of setting items because of the property in which the common setting screen does not depend on the model. That is, when a model-specific parameter is set on the model-dependent individual setting UI side, the common setting screen does not have the value of a parameter to be displayed, and the current setting value is not displayed.